Conventionally, in super market or the like, a customer carries a shopping cart to a place where desired articles are displayed and puts a desired article in the shopping cart. This operation is repeated for the number of desired articles, and the customer then generally stands, with the shopping cart, in a queue to settle the payment.
Conventionally, the processes such as setting of the prices of the displayed articles and changing of the prices once set are performed manually.
However, generally there is a limit on the number of cash registers. Therefore, in the conventional method, when a large number of customers head for the cash registers, the registers get jammed with the customers, and long time is required to complete the checkout operations for all the customers.
Moreover, because the processes such as setting of the prices of the articles and changing of the prices once are performed manually, there is a lot of load on the workers. In addition, since the processes of setting and changing of the prices of the articles are cumbersome, the prices cannot be easily changed. Since the prices of articles are uniquely determined, different prices cannot be easily set in units of articles for customers, respectively. For this reason, the stores cannot sufficiently perform sales promotion matched with customer needs.
The present invention has been made to solve the above problems, and has as its object to provide a checkout apparatus which can effectively perform a checkout process of the cost of purchased articles and which can easily set and change the prices of the articles to make it possible to perform sales promotion, as well as to provide a shopping cart, a checkout method, and a program which causes a computer to execute the method.